Watch an hour of the Planetary Annihilation team making and destroying planets

Your Kickstarter dollars at work.

If there’s one thing I love about modern indie development, it’s exactly how easy it is to get involved with the development process. Case in point: the developers of Planetary Annihilation have recorded their hour-long livestream from last week for you to watch, and it shows you a huge amount of awesome-looking alpha footage direct from their PC, with no marketing bullshots or pre-rendered cutscenes. Love it.

The primary attraction of the video below is of course the engine they’re using to both create and destroy planets. It’s very awesome-looking stuff, and even if you just stick around for a little bit of the video, well worth your time.

Yeah the amount of times they’ve commented on things being done on the server is making me worried it’ll be an online only game. :/

They should link their tech talks to the gameplay more. I like the talks but still want to see directly how this stuff affects gameplay as well and I think the problems they were getting into was that a lot of people want to see how these technologies affect gameplay.

It’s nice they were showing such technical information at all. Even in spite of repeated assurances that so much of what was shown was ‘under the hood’ many people still got pretty confused. Just love the flowfield systems!

mrthumpy:
It’s nice they were showing such technical information at all. Even in spite of repeated assurances that so much of what was shown was ‘under the hood’ many people still got pretty confused. Just love the flowfield systems!

I didn’t watch much of it but SupCom 2 had a flowfield pathfinding that was really amazing.

They showed a SupCom 1 vs 2 comparison for the SupCom 2 development, where SupCom 1 units sort of bundled around each other (not unlike what starcraft units do honestly) when 2 groups were set a waypoint between each other.

Then with flow field the 2 units barely expanded in size as each column of units formed a single line and went in between 2 other columns. It was amazing! http://youtu.be/jA2epda-RkM

well yeah, you didn’t expect them to show footage of a game they’d 80% completed already to “kickstart” it did you?

exe3:
They should link their tech talks to the gameplay more. I like the talks but still want to see directly how this stuff affects gameplay as well and I think the problems they were getting into was that a lot of people want to see how these technologies affect gameplay.

this is already showing off the effect it will have on gameplay…

pretty clear already that rather than tight strategies on well-balanced maps, they’re aiming for Civilization style random map generation and exploration. They also demonstrated the way the terrain can change in at least one way already (via asteroids).

I’m just curious what you’d like to see about “gameplay”, its not like they’re even at the point where they could say “this unit does x damage and 25% splash in 300 range”. They released another unit picture before this vid and I can tell you right now this seems to be heading in a VERY similar direction to Total Annihilation in terms of units, buildings and resources which is no surprise whatsoever. In fact, its exactly what everyone backed it for.

sorry, I’m not trying to madly defend the game but I thought it was pretty obvious that a random planet generator implies that there will be random planets and that flow field path finding implies that the units will move intelligently and dynamically based on obstacles…

How does the tech tree work? SupCom 1 and 2 and TA have the exact same economy systems yet play out very differently.

I’d also like to know how interplanetarily the game works, whether I can send units between them, whether we start on different planets, what kind of technology we could expect like spaceships/satellites. How do asteroids work? Are they context sensitive in that we can just pull 1 out of infinite in order to smash it into a planet to kill it? Can we have satellites orbit the sun for energy? Can we use wormholes between planets? Can we customise the units like Earth 2160? What kind of factory count can we expect? SupCom: FA had the largest scale of the SupCom series (inc. TA) and even then you’d build around 8-10 at most and thin that out as you reached higher tech levels.

Pathfinding I UTTERLY disagree. Have you played SupCom? Or more importantly have you tried moving thousands of units at once? Everyone gets stuck on each other and goes nowhere for 5 minutes. Flowfields has a HUGE effect on gameplay and the devs even said that themselves in the video.

Pathfinding I UTTERLY disagree. Have you played SupCom? Or more importantly have you tried moving thousands of units at once? Everyone gets stuck on each other and goes nowhere for 5 minutes. Flowfields has a HUGE effect on gameplay and the devs even said that themselves in the video.

I meant as far as a specific game mechanic goes, it was a direct response to him mentioning things like how does the tech tree and asteroids work, etc which are design choices completely irrelevant to the tech currently on display. In my earlier post I’d already mentioned that flow fields obviously imply smarter unit movement, which is obviously important because none of us would even be here if we weren’t TA and SupCom fans and everyone knows how well those units didn’t get around.

also interesting that you comment now on how flow fields have a “HUGE” effect on gameplay and that it was highlighted by them in the video, yet your original post was complaining about a lack of information on how this tech would affect gameplay…

No? They said that it had a huge impact on gameplay. They didn’t say, let alone demonstrate, what that impact may be. What I was talking about in my original post was that it would’ve been nice for them to have spawned a thousand of those squares and shown how they move around each other. Shown a formation or two and how they interact with each other/the environment.

Never was I asking for gameplay like “what damage does tank do to ship?” as that’s completely irrelevant to the flowfield talks.

It was quite obvious they weren’t at a stage where they could demonstrate any of that. This wasn’t a gameplay demonstration, this was more a tool demonstration. It was more showing the stuff they were playing with, like how they were going about planet creation and how they were handling unit pathfinding with allusions as to how this might eventually effect gameplay. It was interesting to see how, as they are attempting to answer questions (particularly with the flowfield stuff) how many people on the clip didn’t understand that either. Maybe in a future video you’ll get what you’re asking for, but right now you’re looking in a mixing bowl and asking how that mess of ingredients actually relate to a cake.

You guys misunderstand. I know what the video was about and I liked it. I’m saying to avoid the confusion the guys on the stream were happening maybe they should talk a bit more about how the tech works and everything but link it a bit to how this tech actually gets used and affects the game.

Basically do the tech talk, but also explain how the tech would be used in the game.

How does the tech tree work? SupCom 1 and 2 and TA have the exact same economy systems yet play out very differently.

Actually Supcom 1 and 2 have totally different economy models, that in turn create big differences in gameplay.

TA and SupCom 1 worked on streaming models where metal and energy were supplied to your economy at a rate dictated by the number of mines/power generators you had (energy->metal converters were also streaming). It made for a powerful and flexible economy model if you mastered it, or at least understood the basics and invested in some storage to provide you with buffers for periods of increased demand, since resources weren’t automatically stored/saved like Starcraft. You could start any building/unit you wanted as long as you had the tech to do so without needing the resources to build it ‘banked’ and read to go.

Too many people seemed to find the system overly complex, so in SupCom 2 they went back to the old model of stored resources that were spent as soon as you initiated construction. Simpler, but it also removed the depth and aspect of mastering the economy in the game that was one of the most defining features of TA/SupCom 1. IMO it’s what makes those games true RTS, rather than RTS/RTT hybrids like Starcraft.

mrthumpy: depth and aspect of mastering the economy in the game that was one of the most defining features of TA/SupCom 1

you mean build endless metal extractors/energy extractors surround everything with storage and never run out of supply ?

That was my problem with it anyone good at macro could keep an ever expanding count of production facilities so long as you had an equal ratio of builders constantly building resource extractors/convertors.

That’s certainly what drew me to supcom. It was refreshing to find an RTS based on the big picture macro strategy rather than being so fiddly over microing your units.

I just hope that all the races in PA have engineering stations. I can’t stand playing Aeon or Sepherim as while the ability to have extra engineers help in construction efforts is great i’m less than pleased with the absolute clutter of having dozens of engineers helping build something.

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